Title: Let Down Your Long Hair
Rating: K
Disclaimer: Not mine. No profit made.
A/N: Purely the result of a late-night idea, and my facination with unabridged fairy tales. Go ahead and read a few sometime. That book Dwight read to the kids was not fabricated in the least.
Fairy tales look different as an adult.
He's been reading them to Sasha. They stick in his mind, gaining new connotations.
They're clumsy, bumbling tales with nonsensical plot points, edited into incoherency over the years from their blood-and-sex origins. He isn't sure what exactly they teach his daughter, anyway. To wait for a prince to rescue her?
He only hopes, for her sake, that she takes after her mother in that respect.
Sometimes he feels like he's watching a fairy tale unfold at the office. Can it really be that simple? Boy meets girl true love's first kiss, and happily ever after... He watched the prince stumble in, road-weary and off-script, and sweep his princess off to... what?
Is this her happily ever after, then? Because he thinks that she's the same now as she used to be with Roy. Smiling more, yes, and dressing better, but now she's a girlfriend once more, waiting on a man and a ring and a date to be set.
He liked her before. She could have slain her own dragons. Maybe she did, in breaking off her engagement. Pam Beesly, dragonsbane. Firewalker.
But that was before her story ended, segueing into "their" story. She seems happy with that, but sometimes, he believes--or wants to believe--that some bit of that old spirit remains, wanting more than another engagement and thirty more years of answering phones.
He doesn't really know, though. Her prince may be privy to that information, but certainly not him.
Why are the princes always the heroes in the old stories, anyway? He's never felt like either one, and he's certainly never rushed in to save the girl, on a white charger or otherwise.
If anything, he identifies with the princesses themselves, asleep or just waiting, destined to throw in their lot with the first person who finds them and call it true love.
In his stranger moods, he imagines the annex is an ivory tower, and he is waiting for...
Something. Anything, really.
Once or twice, he tried to throw a line to Pamela Dragonsbane, in the vague hope that she'd climb up and visit him. She always rode past his tower without seeing the rope. Now she's far beyond the horizon, and she doesn't look back.
He wants to be what she was. He wants to take a running leap off the top of the tower, knowing full well there will be no one to catch him.
Maybe, on some fine once-upon-a-time, he will.